Good Prose (20 page)

I was quite taken with myself for having landed at this impressive magazine, but I was also intimidated by the job and by my colleagues. All magazines are dictatorships. Robert Manning ruled over this one, after a successful career at Time Inc. and a term as press spokesman for the State Department. He was used to places where things happened. He signed his memos with a big M. (Office manners dictated that the rest of us use our full set of initials in the lowercase.) Mike Janeway (mcj), to whom I owed my job, served as Manning’s number two. Beneath Janeway, Michael Curtis and I occupied parallel rungs on the masthead. A strict hierarchy obtained. At one Christmas party a mischievous secretary read a poem she had written, a spoof on the old Boston lyric about the Cabots and the Lowells: “Here’s to
The Atlantic
in Boston / Home of the bean and the cod / Where Todd and Curtis speak only to Janeway / And Janeway speaks only to Bob.”

Manning, gruff and easily annoyed, cast a big shadow, but I
was in a way more intimidated by Janeway, my benefactor, who was my exact contemporary (and who became and remains my good friend). He had gone to Harvard, which (as he frequently reminded me) is a better place to have gone than Amherst, and this is especially true in Boston, where Harvard occupies the place that the University of Oklahoma occupies in Norman. Janeway knew a great deal more about the world than I did, and what he knew had already organized itself into a political philosophy. He had worked in the Senate as an aide to LBJ. He was brilliant, and he had connections. If he had been an object, he would been one of those old-fashioned telephone switchboards bristling with wires, most of them plugged into New York or DC. I once looked up from my desk to see a huge, stately, white-haired Dean Acheson under Janeway’s care, like a statue being wheeled down a museum corridor.

My education had been narrowly literary. I had allowed myself to cushion my ignorance of the world with the idea that all politics were (was?—one never knows) not local but vulgar. I kept myself afloat by applying the reflexes of literary criticism to just about everything. I had an excessively scrupulous eye for style, a trait to which both education and instinct predisposed me. As far as it went, I guess it was a good eye. I did not succeed in bringing any names to the magazine. My fortunes seemed to rest entirely on my ability to fix things, and on my critical remarks on the yellow “comment sheets” that circulated among the editors with manuscripts under consideration. Without any particular convictions of my own, I developed a sense for the proper intonations of the center-left liberalism that the magazine
stood for. By the time Kidder arrived on the scene I had been promoted, and sat in what was to be the nicest office of my professional life, the room, once the mansion’s library, overlooking Marlborough Street. It had been the office of Charles Morton, the much-loved sidekick of the prominent editor Edward Weeks, in the 1940s and ’50s. One day, when I was beginning to feel comfortable there, I encountered in the stairway a woman who had worked at the magazine for many years. She said, “Oh, hello there. I know who you are. You’re the boy who sits in Mr. Morton’s office.”

Why is it so hard to summon a face from the past? When I try to picture Kidder in those days the first thing I see is a blue-striped seersucker jacket, a size too small for its owner, and in need of a trip to the cleaner’s. He was big, well over six feet tall, lean but powerfully built through the shoulders. He had played football in high school. I don’t mean that he advertised this fact. I came to learn it later, but it would not have been hard to imagine him on the playing field. He was expansive in gesture, given to waving his arms in explanation of an idea, and the space around him, whatever it was, always seemed too small to contain him. More than once over the years I have accused him of not sitting but falling into his chair (especially when I have had an interest in the chair in question). Yet this suggests a rather overbearing figure, and that wasn’t the effect at all. He seemed oblivious of his size and force, stammered a bit when he spoke, and on the rare occasion when he took off his glasses, revealing circles of untanned skin, he would blink myopically. Above all, he seemed desperately afraid of giving offense.

I guess there was a time, as he suggests, when I was a more prominent figure in his life than he was in mine, but that was, as they say, destined to change. I didn’t then but I now grow pumpkins in my leisure time. Pumpkin plants start out very small, and then the vines start to run and one day they cover the field. Kidder’s presence at the magazine, and eventually in my life, was like that. He spread, and soon it was hard to imagine the world without him. He became in effect a staff writer, though unsalaried, and he was willing to take on almost anything. As we worked together, we became close friends.

On the surface we seemed quite different in temperament. Kidder had a gift for externalizing his anxieties, which allowed me to pretend to a tranquility I seldom felt. We had some vices in common and some interests beyond literary ones, notably sailing. He had the use of his father’s sailboat for a week in the summer and we took a number of short cruises with our wives and another friend or two. Kidder was a good sailor, which meant you could relax on board knowing that the captain was unlikely to endanger your life, not always true in my sailing experience.
You
could relax, but he by nature could not, and his constant dithering was a source of amusement for his guests. Once, coming out of the Damariscotta River in Maine—into what was admittedly a shifting breeze—we changed jibs six times in about as many minutes. The beeriness of those days has been noted, but Kidder was what you might call an omniboire. It was not unusual for him during the course of a day to have a handful of beers, some Cokes, iced coffee, and a ginger ale or two before the anchor was down and it was safe to uncap the rum and uncork the wine. On the first trip we took we had to resupply
after a day, and subsequently I took on the job of provisioning the boat.

Despite differences in style, we shared a code common to men of our era, which meant that we didn’t expect much, or feel like offering much, in the way of confidences or confessions. Our dialogue was mostly made up of amiable insult. This mode of being is much lamented, but it is not entirely useless as a basis for lasting friendship, at least if you have time, and as it turned out we had decades.

The inherited idea of writer as reprobate and sot, editor as stabilizing influence, often undergoes modification in life. I remember a writer coming back from New York after an evening with his editor, who had not behaved well. The writer had to put the drunken editor into a taxi. The writer was quite disappointed by this scene. He thought that he was the one who by literary tradition was entitled to get drunk, and had been looking forward to it. In our case, Kidder may have been a more colorful drinker than I, but neither of us was unacquainted with the sauce.

Kidder in those days did, it’s true, affect a certain air of dissolution and disarray. But, the reverse of Holden Caulfield’s “secret slob,” he was secretly organized. He was unfailingly punctual, for instance, and he had a virtue useful to a writer, a virtue he has never lost: an obsessive mind. It was clear from the start that he was going to be a writer. Successful or not, who can ever tell? But a writer. Over the years people have sometimes asked me what it “takes” to be a writer. When I answer this I start sounding like a basketball coach speaking of “desire.” But, really, the answer is that it seems to take an inability to imagine
yourself doing anything else—because anything else is so much easier. It would have been impossible to discourage Kidder, and heartless to try.

We have had some sport with Kidder’s earliest work, the draft of his first magazine article and its lurid lead, and especially with the marvelously inflated novel
Ivory Fields
. In retrospect, though, these efforts are revealing. Why did his first article prove so stubborn? There was nothing wrong with the mass murder case as a subject. It was a fine subject for someone, but it was the wrong one for Kidder. It didn’t fundamentally interest him. Years after I read
Ivory Fields
, after the merriment had died down, I found myself thinking of a line in it that was actually quite prophetic. The author says of his hero, the young lieutenant: “He is good, he is going to be brave, the night spills on him.” Yes, this was inadvertently amusing, but from the start, I later realized, Kidder had an interest quite unusual for a writer, an interest in virtue. It’s an immeasurably harder subject than vice. A bright thread of goodness runs through his subsequent books.

As I say, not easy to do. It was only when he was writing
Mountains Beyond Mountains
that I gave it the name “the problem of goodness.” It’s just as well that we weren’t aware right away of this theme, preoccupation, instinct—whatever it was. And yet it’s the kind of thing an editor should be looking for. An editor can serve a writer by being alert to his natural boundaries, his inner territory, his true interests.

I think Kidder’s subjects understand his predispositions instinctively. Everyone can sense when someone is looking for the good within them, and it opens people to questioning in a way that reveals the good and everything else as well. As a reporting
strategy, this approach is far more effective than the probing, even inquisitorial mode of some reporters. But it isn’t a strategy, it’s a way of looking at the world.

When we began working together on magazine pieces, I had no idea where it would lead, but in retrospect it was the perfect preparation for our work on books. I don’t know that the editorial relationship we have is unique, but I have never encountered another like it. That we work together from the start of a project, from the inception of an idea, is a process that asks more from the author than it does from the editor. The author must set aside that natural self-protectiveness that any work in its early stages inspires. A “thick skin” doesn’t begin to describe the necessary virtue. It is essentially an act of generosity. The editor needs only some tact and the willingness to read things repeatedly.

The advantages to this approach are vast. The editor has the satisfaction of being part of the conception of the work, and thus takes some responsibility for it, getting involved when there is time for influence. I don’t consider much of my life to be exemplary, but this way of working is worth imitating for a writer and editor. It is not the easiest arrangement to come by, and in truth we simply fell into it through a meshing of personality and circumstance, and good fortune too—that is, an initial success, with Kidder’s
The Soul of a New Machine
.

•

One frequently hears the complaint that “editors don’t edit anymore.” It is true that the publishing industry is not organized to reward editors who spend a lot of time on books that are
under contract and will not appear for two or three or four years to come. In most houses, anyway, the pressure is to sign up something new and promising and to keep doing so (and to go to meetings about sales and marketing). In this sense editors resemble venture capitalists, their main task to find brightness and bring it to the public.

There are two kinds of pleasure for editors. One is acquisition, the collector’s pleasure. The other is working with writers. It is like the difference between buying an antique car in mint condition or buying one that needs work. I am more the mechanic. (A strange thing to say, since I am incapable of fixing anything that isn’t made of words.) But editors who collect and admire are often better than the mechanics at promoting their books. As a writer, of course, what you really want is someone strong on both counts.

If some editors don’t really like to edit, it is equally true that writers themselves sometimes resist editing. I always wince when a reviewer says, “This book needed an editor.” Often it had an editor, but the writer prevailed. Sometimes a book arrives at an editor’s desk too late for the editor to make a substantial difference. The writer is exhausted and committed to his errors, the publishing schedule is set, it is simply too late all around. To repeat: a writer should try to involve the editor early in the process. If editors resist, well, there is not much you can do. You don’t want a perfunctory involvement. You want investment.

I edit a distinguished man of science and medicine. Ignorant of much of his subject, learning every time I read his manuscripts, I nonetheless sometimes find myself in dispute with him about the internal logic of his arguments. Once he seemed to
participate in a scientific fallacy that deems the understanding of a physical process superior to a moral or emotional understanding. If you can trace the neural pathways of criminality, do you know more about criminals than Dostoyevsky knows? No, you know something different. I accused my friend of “scientific triumphalism,” a term that lives on between us. Editing at its best involves the intellectual engagement between editor and author.

Editing at its worst is more like combat. As a young magazine editor, I once worked with a ferocious investigative journalist, a man of great energies and passion, but also of innuendo, fact-stretching, and turgidity. This was an abject failure of mine. I don’t remember many of the details, though I do remember getting drunk in a hotel room with his manuscript spread out on the bed, falling asleep, unable to fix it. Sometimes editing becomes a test of both intellect and character. I failed on both counts. I couldn’t get the many problems of the manuscript straight in my own head and I couldn’t face the fact that I couldn’t solve them. Worse, I lacked the strength to confront him. Sometimes editors have to say: “Okay, I don’t get it. Take me through this every step of the way.” What I remember best is his describing his technique for getting a source to talk to him: “So I called him up and told his secretary, ‘Okay, if he won’t talk, just tell him I’m going to go with the fellatio story.’ ” This whole dreary episode yields little instruction for a writer, but an editor can learn plenty from it. You have to admit your confusion, and you have to go back to the author. You can’t assume that you can fix what’s wrong all by yourself.